Dulin replied into the comm. “Your signal is intermittent. Say again your location?”
A pop of static. “ . . . Northwest.”
Just then they heard a crash to the north and a honking horn. Everyone had been looking to the south. They turned their heads and gun barrels north to the sound of the noise and saw a civilian pickup truck, one headlight dead and black, smash through the fence and bounce out of the sand and onto the tarmac. The truck was moving at an incredible clip, directly towards the L-100.
The voice came over the comms again. “I’ve got company!”
Just then, headlights appeared along a wide track behind the wildly bouncing vehicle. First two sets, then four, then more.
Dulin assessed the situation for one second. Then he called out to his crew over the engine’s whine, “Up the ramp!”
—
All five were aboard, and the L-100 was already rolling down the runway when an armed man in dirty gear and body armor sprinted up the back ramp. McVee grabbed the “package’s” gloved hand and pulled him up the steep incline, and Markham slammed his hand on the hydraulic lift lever to close the ramp. Dulin gave a command to the pilots on the cabin intercom, and the four turboprop engines gunned for takeoff.
With the ramp sealed shut, the package dropped onto his kneepads in the middle of the bare cabin. His M4 rifle was slung over a general issue chest harness missing most of its ammunition and a brown Nomex tunic torn in several places. The man’s face was covered with goggles, smeared greasepaint, and sweat. He pulled his helmet off, dropped it to the floor of the cabin, already inclining during itstakeoff rotation. Steam poured from a sopping mat of thick brown hair, and his beard dripped perspiration like a leaky faucet.
Dulin lifted the Gray Man from the floor and put him on the bench along the cabin’s skin. He secured him to the bench with a belt and sat next to him.
“You hurt?” he asked.
The man shook his head.
“Let me help you get your gear off.” Dulin shouted over the engines.
“I’ll keep it on.”
“Suit yourself. Just a forty-minute flight. Once in Turkey, we’ll go to a safe house, and tomorrow night Fitzroy will have instructions for you. We’ll watch your back till then.”
“I appreciate it,” said the filthy man through labored breaths. His eyes stayed on the floor as he spoke. His arms draped over the top of the black rifle hanging from his neck.
The other four men had strapped themselves into the red mesh bench lining the side of the fuselage. They all stared at the package, trying without success to reconcile the average-looking operator next to them with his superhuman reputation.
The Gray Man and Dulin sat by a pallet of gear strapped with webbing to the middle of the deck.
Dulin said, “I’m going to call Fitzroy, let him know we’re wheels up. I’ll grab you some water and be back in a second.” He then turned and climbed the steeply ascending aircraft to the front of the cabin. He pulled out his satellite phone as he walked.
—
It was just after three in the morning in London, and on the sixth floor of a whitewashed office building on London’s Bayswater Road, an aging man in a wrinkled pinstripe suit drummed his fingers on his desk. His face white, perspiration ran down his fleshy neck and soaked his Egyptian broadcloth oxford. Donald Fitzroy tried to relax himself, to remove the obvious worry from his voice.
The satellite phone chirped again.
He looked again, for the twentieth time, to the framed photograph on his desk. His son, now forty, sitting on a hammock on a beach, his beautiful wife beside him. Twins, both girls, one in each parent’s lap. Smiles all around.
Fitzroy looked away from the framed photo and towards a sheaf of loose photographs in his thick hands. These shots he had also given twenty looks. It was the same four, the same family, though the twins were slightly older now.
It was typical surveillance quality: the family at a park, the twins at their school near Grosvenor Square, the daughter-in-law pushing a shopping cart through the market. Fitzroy detected from the angles and the proximity to their subjects that the photographer was sending a message that he could have easily walked up to the four and put a hand on each of them.
Lloyd’s implication was clear: Fitzroy’s family could be gotten to at any time.
The sat phone chirped a third time.
Fitzroy exhaled fully, threw the photos to the floor, and grabbed the nagging device.
“Standstill. How copy, Fullcourt?”
—
